TD expresses shock at comments from SFI Director General and Government chief Scientific Advisor
“Bizarre cavalier comments” from chief Government advisor at odds with latest IPCC report says Brid Smith TD
Bríd Smith TD has called on the Government’s Chief Scientific Advisor (Mark Ferguson) to clarify comments at yesterday’s Joint Committee on Climate Action yesterday afternoon at which he expressed confidence in new technology to capture and store carbon emissions.
The TD said the comments were at odds with wide-spread scientific evaluation of the possibility of using unproven Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) technology to remove Co2 already in the atmosphere on the scale needed. She said the reality is most of a handful of CCS plants in operation were actually designed to allow oil and gas companies extract more oil and gas from existing wells, not to remove Co2.
Bríd Smith TD said:
“There are no commercial CCS plants in operation. The fact is CCS is used as a fig leaf by the fossil fuel industry to justify continued extraction and exploration. It’s a version of ‘sin now, atone tomorrow.”
The TD also attacked the Science Foundation Ireland DGs comment on gas as an alternative.
“Leading climate scientists have made it clear that gas is not a bridging or transition fuel, it emits high levels of Co2 and is incompatible with real action to cut Co2 emissions.”
The TD who is a member of Climate Action Committee said the comments were outrageous and “showed an unbelievably cavalier attitude to the catastrophe that is unfolding around the world.”
Prof Ferguson said that fossil fuels should not be demonised, that gas was a low carbon fuel and that science could always avert predicted disasters (See notes below).
She added: “The IPCC report last week told us we have 12 years to drastically cut our emissions in order to stave off catastrophic climate change. To hear our chief science official issue such comments is frightening. Such sentiments are used by the fossil fuel industry to continue business as usual. It is a blind and unfounded belief in the capacity of science to rescue us at some stage in the future so we don’t have to deal with the realities of climate change now.”
She added: “We need to reduce Co2 emissions drastically; pretending that someone, at some stage, might invent something to do it for us is a cop out and utterly irresponsible.”
Notes-
Prof Mark Ferguson is the Director General of Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) and the Governments Chief Scientific Advisor.
He was addressing the Joint Committee on Communications, Climate Action and the Environment which is considering the recommendations of the Citizens Assembly on Climate Change
The following comments from Prof. Ferguson are from the committee hearing-
“Please don’t necessarily demonise oil and gas, you’re getting very close to low carbon gas because what people are thinking about is you extract the gas, and there’s a lot of it in Mayo offshore and there’s a lot of it around Cork and then the area that you take the gas out of – you concentrate and pump back down carbon dioxide and you are going to need those fossil fuels in any transition to a low carbon economy. And the trick is to lower the carbon footprint of the gas extraction, there’s a big business there in terms of reusing that vast amount of empty space that we take gas out of… “
…”And the last comment I would say is as a scientist, I am optimistic. Climate change is a big problem and a big issue but I remind you that no crisis that was ever predicted in human history has come to pass. Many times we have predicted that we were going to run out of food and we’ve never run out of food and why is that? It’s because science and innovation has moved faster than the crisis. It’s either the mechanisation on farms, it’s the fertilisation of ground, it’s genetic engineering of crops, whatever – it’s moved faster. I believe the opportunity in climate change will be for the science and innovation to move faster than the problem and that will be a combination of trying to do better what we do which is all the mitigation stuff that’s really important and thinking about brand new industries. So please don’t lose sight of that and please don’t lose sight of the fact that we have to transition from our existing fossil fuels into a new era and part of that is low carbon gas”..